The VAX Archive: Sperry Univac & Ferguson Big Board

It was a last act of final desperation.

My name had been passed to them through a chain of events, from person to person, finally arriving at the other end of the phone.

The computer was almost thirty years old, running not only the research department, but some critical aspects of a research project that was ongoing, and then it just stopped working.

Part of the memory core had burnt out.

The voice on the other end of the phone was tired, hopeless, as they explained the computer and asked if I could help.

I could.

Really?

Yes. I know the exact memory that it uses.

How?

I’m staring at a few stacks of it on the shelf across from me.

No cost.

But somebody would have to come and pick it up, there was no way I would risk shipping it.

I majored in computer science because I had to make a living in life and that wasn’t going to come from budo, not in this day and age.

Computer science because I had both a talent and tolerance for it.

It was during my senior year that the University was remodeling one of the computer labs with dozens of micro-computers and all of the terminals and the VAX in the other room had to go.

Go, as in the garbage, a dumpster out back, and I just happen to be walking by before all of it was pitched.

Not even a thank you for its service.

A friend let me borrow his van for a case of beer and it found a home in my parent’s garage as word began to get around.

My mother tolerated much, but even she had her limits and at some point I was evicted from the garage and the basement which I took over.

Even the Sperry Univac that doubled as a bookcase in the living room.

It took me a year to get settled in the new home.

Word spread organically, give and take.

People who had given their lives to a machine, spent incalculable hours using them, could not bear to see it thrown out, so they sent it to me.

People who had old machines or needed a specific manual or schematic I gave to them.

Like when one person needed the schematics for a Ferguson Big Board.

Here are scans of the schematics and pictures of the board itself.

It finally stopped when I had to start branching out to storage units to keep it all, and at that point the window had closed.

The promise of that Golden Age, a computer in every house, now homogenized.

There was nothing else to collect, save, or find as people stopped calling, stopped giving, stopped asking, time had passed those custodians.

Yet words still echoed about a guy who might have it, and every few years a call would come in hoping for a long shot.